CURRENTS: SELF-HELP.

The healing chronicles

Buffeted by health crises, bad marriages, these women embraced memoir writing as their form of therapy

December 29, 2004|By Denice Ryan Martin, Special to the Tribune.

Pick up a memoir, and chances are you'll be inspired.

Women writers are embracing this literary form as a creative way to make sense of the challenges in their lives. Whether the subject is a broken heart, a fractured family or a life-changing medical diagnosis, writers say the process of writing one's memoir can help one heal.

Take Suzy Becker's tale. This 42-year-old best-selling author and cartoonist ("All I Need to Know I Learned From My Cat," Workman Publishing) was newly accepted for a prestigious Harvard fellowship when a seizure rocked her world. Doctors discovered a brain tumor, and Becker underwent surgery. During a slow recovery, the humorist found herself at a loss for words and her drawing hand stilled.

"I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse?" (Workman Publishing) is Becker's painstaking recollection of the exhausting medical ordeal and the havoc it wreaked on her creative work and personal relationships. It's a blend of irreverent text and cartoons that reveals Becker's vulnerability and resolve.

"Writing lets us read our own minds--literally," said Kathleen Adams, director of the Center for Journal Therapy in Denver. Adams, a psychotherapist and a registered poetry/journal therapist/trainer, is an adjunct faculty member at University College at the University of Denver.

When clients write fluently about their experiences, they are able to deconstruct or demystify their stories, Adams said. By organizing a story into words, the writer has the opportunity to process the feelings, facts and experiences in a much more manageable way, she said.

"They can step back and say, `This is a bad thing, but it doesn't have to run my life,'" Adams said.

Such was the case with Becker. Several months after surgery, Becker managed to fulfill the Harvard fellowship, selecting her memoir as the required project. Using notebooks and sketches from her recovery period, Becker completed the book in three years. She believes the artistic process was therapeutic.

"Whether it's writing, dancing, cooking, eating bon bons in a bathtub, I think women have a sense of what heals them," she said. "I wrote because I'm a writer. I like to record and make sense of things that way. It turned out to be very healing."

Becker, a resident of Bolton, Mass., said an unexpected benefit of sharing her story was reaching readers on a deeper level.

"I think people read memoirs the way they used to read self-help books: in search of self, life lessons gleaned from others' lives," Becker said.

Unlike Becker, who had a publisher lined up for her memoir in a matter of months, author and poet Judith Strasser initially thought her memoir would stay in her underwear drawer until after her death.

Strasser's "Black Eye: Escaping a Marriage, Writing a Life" (Terrace Books/The University of Wisconsin Press) creates narrative prose out of diary entries chronicling the disintegration of her marriage and reflections written after her divorce. Writing the memoir took 12 years, during which, Strasser said, her friends encouraged her to polish it for publication.

In the book, Strasser, now 60, pondered how she, a well-educated child of the 1960s, wound up in an abusive marriage. She shares her painful memories but also her strong desire to pursue her poetry and prose writing.

Strasser acknowledges the therapeutic benefits of writing her story.

"I think that writing a memoir, even if it is never published, is a healing process," she said. "Like therapy, memoir-writing is a formal process of coming to know one's self, which is essential to being a whole person."

The Madison, Wis.-based Strasser said the book's effect on women readers was deeper than expected.

"I didn't write with the intention of helping anyone except myself," she said. "In fact, it seems rather arrogant to think that my experience would be helpful to other women."

In particular, survivors of domestic abuse have responded to her story.

"I have been both astonished and humbled by the positive reaction from women who've had similar experiences," Strasser said.

Like Strasser, Chicago writer and NPR commentator Beth Finke had no intention of publishing the journal she kept on tape as she battled Type I diabetes, which left her blind despite several eye surgeries. Soon after losing her sight, she became pregnant. After a normal pregnancy, Finke and her husband were devastated when their infant son nearly died at birth because of a genetic abnormality, resulting in severe physical and cognitive disabilities.

Finke, 46, struggled to accept and adapt to her blindness and care for a needy son while trying to resuscitate her failing marriage.

"Long Time, No See" (University of Illinois Press) took Finke three years to write and 10 years to revise and publish. Finke said readers comment that the book "reads like a friend is sitting across the table chatting over coffee."